Sikeston Convalescent Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid places with a bunch of severe deficiencies flagged. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's second highest score was long-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D in that area. This is still a well below average grade. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the nursing home is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated 78.861786 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit lower than average. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

In our next category, we gave this facility a rock-bottom F in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Based on its abysmal score in this area, we weren't stunned to discover this facility provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.

The last area we graded was nursing, in which this facility received an abysmal score here also. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is definitely very concerning. There are several subcategories included in this area. Most of these criteria are tied to nurse staffing. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.